The Killer is Behind the Door!

It's Friday night. Bored, dateless, and alone, you decide to spend the night watching movies and wallowing in your own solitude. You go to the video store, and find something that you've never seen before in the new release section. Your friend told you it was good, and of course you can trust your friend's opinion on everything. After arguing with the irritating redheaded kid at the counter about how you are old enough to rent this movie, you return home. You fix yourself a tasty treat and grab a soda from the fridge, then flop down on the couch and pop in the DVD.

The DVD whirs, sputters, and refuses to work because the last person to watch it got a mixture of Vaseline and strawberry jam all over the disc. So you return to the video store and repeat the process. Finally you return home and, tired and exasperated, begin the newly selected movie.

You sit there, cramming your face with greasy buttery munchies, and watching the film as it progresses. At some point, you may make an observation, either to yourself or out loud, about what is happening in the movie. More specifically, you may utter something like, "The killer is behind the door," "Mr. Johnson is actually Rachel's father," or even "The dead street worker is in the trunk of the car!"

Most of the time these predictions turn out to be false. But on the odd time, what you've said will happen actually occurs in the movie. So this brings up the question. If you predict something and it happens, did you actually know that it would happen?

The three things one needs to have knowledge of something are belief, justification, and truth. In this situation, do these three apply? Well yes and no. We have belief that the killer is behind the door. Our justification can stem from many sources in this case. If we are a person who has seen many films in their life, we can say that there are many other films that follow the cliche of a killer behind the door. We can also say that there are many atmospheric factors that justify our belief. Eerie music, frightening and dark atmospheres, and other factors of imagery can lead us to believe that something bad will occur right away. The factor of truth is where things become interesting. At the moment we make the prediction about the killer being behind the door, nothing has occurred to verify this as the truth. But when the killer emerges and crushes the pretty blonde females skull with a brick, then there's our truth, splattered all over the screen.

This suggests that overall, you didn't know it would happen. This is because you did not have the truth portion of the three essentials when the assumption was made. However, when the event you predicted occurs, you know that it has just happened because the element of truth has been added to the mix. And nothing could be farther from the honest brutal truth than seeing someone take a brick to the head.